Popular Figure Has His Own Figurines —Cagle

BACK IN August, we ran a cover story on industry veterans and featured some of their memorable stories, an idea we’d like to repeat for a future issue. Or, we’ll just call Jesse Williamson and ask him to spin a few yarns.

The president of Williamson Printing in Dallas is an honest and open man, one of the more colorful and charismatic figures in the printing industry. The stories other people tell about Williamson are pretty amusing, and almost as good as those he tells on himself. Too bad we can’t tell them all, but a funny one appears in his Hall of Fame profile on page 38.

And what other principle in the industry has his own action figures? Two, in fact. It’s true; we have them sitting atop our partitions. One represents Jesse before he lost 150 pounds; the other is how he looks today…though the ears are disproportionate. All this time I thought Adam Dunn was the biggest thing to come out of Texas—the Dumbos on the “after” Jesse put Ross Perot’s to shame. Fortunately for Jesse, the ears aren’t accurate. The likeness is striking—a great printing job by Williamson, with the dolls by Toy2r (www.toy2r.com).

One outtake from the Hall of Fame interview: A young Jesse waits two hours in the foyer of a potential customer. When the prospect finally arrives, he discovers that Jesse, like himself, was a graduate of Southern Methodist University. They chew the fat for a little while and, before he knows it, Jesse nails down the account. Good salesmanship, to be sure, nothing overly impressive. But what was the reason behind making Jesse wait so long?

“He came in with blood covering his overalls,” Jesse explains. “He’d been castrating cows.”